Author of U of T study says dyslexic children should be screened for physical abuse

I know it's not scientific or anything, but my sister is dyslexic, and - as we grew up together - I'm fairly certain she wasn't physically abused as a child. My guess would be that physical abuse, if it is truly higher among dyslexics, would stem from parental/guardian frustration over dealing with a dyslexic child... or from dyslexic parents/guardians who never learned coping mechanisms venting frustration on children who happen to be dyslexic themselves.

This kicks up the dial on my bullshit meter about three notches.

caw

Yeah...I'd have to read the study to draw a firm conclusion, but I'm with blacbird on this one. Same kind of red flags that went up for me with that horribly sloppy study in pesticide proximity and pregnancy to up for me with this one.

Always be wary of any "study" that is nothing more than someone going through publicly available data and crapping out the very correlation they went in looking for (you'll notice she also found the exact same results with ADHD kids. What a coincidence! ).

This kicks up the dial on my bullshit meter about three notches.

Click to expand...

Yeah, mine is making that annoying bloopety bloop sound.

Wilde_at_heart said:

A recent University of Toronto study has found a major link between dyslexia and childhood physical abuse.

Published last week in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, the study found that just over one third of Canadians afflicted with dyslexia – a learning disability that affects an estimated five million Canadians and can hinder reading, writing or sometimes even speech – reported they were physically abused during childhood.

.....


But what is still unclear to her is whether dyslexia is the result of physical abuse, or the other way around.

http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/10...ildren-should-be-screened-for-physical-abuse/

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My initial question was what percentage of people who don't have dyslexia were abused as kids, but the results state that it's only 7%. Which seems really low to me, actually. But I live in the US, the land of "Spare the rod and spoil the child."

Self reporting is an issue, of course. It's possible that people who are dyslexic could remember or classify childhood abuse differently. Also, as you stated, this doesn't address the Chicken and Egg issue. If parents with dyslexic kids are, say, frustrated with poor performance in school or with their kids failing to follow directions (dyslexia can lead to issues with verbal processing too), then some might end up in a spiral of increasingly frequent physical punishment, which can certainly lead to abuse. It certainly doesn't mean abuse causes dyslexia, though I believe that childhood abuse has been linked to other cognitive issues. It's not like there aren't already a long list of long-term issues that stem from child abuse.

Even if it's the dyslexia driving the abuse, though, it's a potentially interesting finding that might bear further investigation. If it turns out there is a connection either way, it's important to diagnose dyslexia as early as possible and to educate parents of dyslexic kids about the issue.

Also important to note that 2/3 of dyslexic kids are not showing this correlation (whether it turns out to be accurate or not), so assuming that a dyslexic kid is being abused at home (or that a non dyslexic kid isn't) is not going to be a very parsimonious approach.

Sounds like bad correlations to me. I dunno.

In the words of a particularly fantastic anime professional gag dub, "My BS detector's goin' DING!"